| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言學研究所 === 86 === This study is aimed at exploring the communication problem between different social groups via the change of compliment response in Chinese society.
Compliment response is divided into three routines: rejection, avoidance, and acceptance, based on which, four hypotheses are proposed:a) the traditional compliment routine--rejection--is surpassed by acceptance; b) the preference for a certain routine of complimetn response co-varies with informants'' social characteristics; c) the selection of routines varies with intimacy; d) the differentiation of compliment response varies with intimacy. Questionnaire is the main tool to collect data, within which intimacy is controlled by four factors: familiarity, generation, ranking, and gender difference. Nine possible answers are offered for the informants to respond to the compliment paid by people of different intimacy in thirteen questions. The collected data is analyzed with Chi-Square test.
The first major finding is that compliment response is changing, with the use of acceptance surpassing traditional rejection and becoming a new normative response. This may be related to the release of individualism from the traditionally repressed self. Second, compliment response is diverse according to the classification of informants by age, gender, and educational level. Higher educational level, middle age group, and females all contribute to the change, among which, higher-educated, middle-aged females'' behavior is the most significant. This may be explicated viaindependent thinking of informants, anti-authoritarianism movement, and feminism. Third, the differentiation of compliment response co-varies with the degree of intimacy. More elaborate differentiation is used in talking to familiars and different generation. Fourth, the selection of acceptance varies with intimacy while rejection does not. Fifth, [±direct] and [±accept] are sufficient to account for the deep structure of compliment response. Generally, almost all the hypotheses are verified.
The above findings can be explained by the change of frame caused by the value shift in Chinese society. Leech''s Modesty and Agreement Maxim as well as Brown and Levinson''s face want approach are adopted to account for the variation and change. It is proposed that the keen competition between various politeness principles, resulting from individualism and identical expectation, formed by the traditional culture, manifests the the conflict of modernization and tradition preservation.
The study is different from previous ones in several respects: a ) the least classification of compliment response, b) a quantitative study of frames, c) a new interpretation for face want approach, and d) the application of politeness maxims from a dynamic point of view.
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